Working from home turned me into a terrible mum

Can the passage of time ever assuage parental guilt? After all, brooding over what can’t be changed is a pointless diversion. Unfortunately, guilt is a duplicitous bedfellow – and one which never sleeps. So even though, in my own case, my children are ‘all grown up’ (two married, one living abroad and one at university 100 miles from home), thoughts are often triggered about my deficiencies as a mother during their upbringing. Not least thanks to the ubiquity of the so-called work from home ‘revolution’, which frequently leads me to pick at the past. 

You see, my name is Angela and working from home made me a bad mother. Not for the reasons just given by Ofsted head Sir Martyn Oliver, who last week said that parents working from home ‘makes children feel school is optional’. In my case, I was always more than happy – enthusiastically so – to usher my children out of the door.